For Tomorrow

This past CodeForces global round ( Global Round 27 ) was the first rated contest in 3 months that was conveniently timed for me. Needless to say, I was excited. I breezed through A, B, and C. I encountered a little hiccup at D, but it wasn't too hard of a problem. Now I had more than 2 hours to work on any other problem and, spoiler alert, I didn’t solve anything. The first place I went wrong was underestimating the difficulty of E. Usually, I can use my intuition to guess some greedy for early problems (I literally guessed B and C in this round), but this has to stop once I reach a problem that's supposed to be hard. But the very notion that a problem is hard can actually change our perception on solving it. If I think a problem is hard, it becomes infinitely harder to motivate myself to find a solution for it. If it's beyond my skill level, what's the chance I can think of and then correctly implement it in the span of a short contest. If so few others have gotten ...

I still remember how life was before quarantine, being carefree and indifferent to the big problems of the world; living life through the highs of today rather than the worries of tomorrow. And many people say that quarantine made kids grow up too fast, showing them that the world isn’t a perfect place, rather a collection of imperfect ideas that when looked at from the right angle gives the illusion of tranquility. An illusion that was broken in seconds. When people say this, they usually mean it negatively, as if to say being older is being thrust into a world with problems, without the solutions. And I completely agree with this, but is it such a bad thing? As people, we naturally feel lost when there’s nothing we’re working towards, like a big promotion, a group project, or a nonprofit cause. But children haven’t developed this sense of self-awareness. Naturally, as we get older, this universal fact becomes clearer and even self-evident. I feel lucky that I got a taste for this dur...